Scot Schultz from Mellanox writes that the company is moving the industry forward to a world-class off-load network architecture that will pave the way to Exascale. “Mellanox, alongside many industry thought-leaders, is a leader in advancing the Co-Design approach. The key value and core goal is to strive for more CPU offload capabilities and acceleration techniques while maintaining forward and backward compatibility of new and existing infrastructures; and the result is nothing less than the world’s most advanced interconnect, which continues to yield the most powerful and efficient supercomputers ever deployed.”

The 2016 OpenFabrics Workshop has extended the dealing for its Call for Sessions to Feb. 1, 2016. The event takes place April 4-8, 2016 in Monterey, California. “The Workshop is the premier event for collaboration between OpenFabrics Software (OFS) producers and those whose systems and applications depend on the technology. Every year, the workshop generates lively exchanges among Alliance members, developers and users who all share a vested interest in high performance networks.”

“The Intel Omni-Path Architecture is designed to deliver the performance for tomorrow’s HPC workloads and the ability to scale to tens—and eventually hundreds—of thousands of nodes at a cost-competitive price to today’s fabrics. This next-generation fabric from Intel builds on the Intel True Scale Fabric with an end-to-end solution, including PCIe* adapters, silicon, switches, cables, and management software. Customers deploying Intel True Scale Fabric today will be able to migrate to Intel Omni-Path Architecture through an Intel upgrade program.”

In this special guest feature, John Kirkley writes that Intel is using its new Omni-Path Architecture as a foundation for supercomputing systems that will scale to 200 Petaflops and beyond. “With its ability to scale to tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of nodes, the Intel Omni-Path Architecture is designed for tomorrow’s HPC workloads. The platform has its sights set squarely on Exascale performance while supporting more modest, but still demanding, future HPC implementations.”

The Open Compute Project, initiated by Facebook as a way to increase computing power while lowering associated costs with hyper-scale computing, has gained a significant industry following. Several vendors have released, or will soon release, servers based on Open Compute specifications.

In this slidecast, Bill Lee and Rupert Dance from the InfiniBand Trade Association describe the new IBTA Volume 1 Specification Release. “The new release defines new capabilities that will enable computer systems to keep up with the requirements for increased scalability and bandwidth, along with high computing efficiency and high availability for both high performance computing and commercial enterprise data centers.”

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